


Like Fuel to the Fire

by rivendells



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: AU - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Deception, M/M, the slowest of burns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2017-08-12
Packaged: 2018-06-04 08:42:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6650782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivendells/pseuds/rivendells
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He never came to visit me in prison" — AU in which Robert Townsend, against his better judgement, does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I started writing this fic right after 2x05 aired (...it's been sitting in my word processor for too long), so this is canon compliant up to that episode — and after that, very divergent. A few notes: it's not clear yet if Robert has any siblings in the show ("He's my only son", as Samuel Townsend said), but I'm headcanoning that he has his sisters Audrey, Sarah "Sally", and Phebe, who would be 23, 18, and 15 at the time of 1778 respectively, even if they won't come into play until part 2. Happy Turn Eve, all! We're almost there!
> 
> Title from Agnes Obel's [Fuel to the Fire](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWUhIURJW_4).

Woodhull leaves close to midnight.

Robert listens to the self-important jaunt of Abraham's steps down the stairs, a swift and light tread that bothers very little with silence as he goes, fading into obscurity as a cart rattles down the street after him. As to his purpose, Robert has no doubt it is a depraved one: backalley spying or whorehouse eavesdropping — nefarious pursuits that reek of underhanded desperation, stinking of the futility of one man against an empire of millions. It does not matter that he is Washington's spy, because here, caught in the cloying folds of a suffocated York City, he is alone.

Or so Robert tells himself. Woodhull has no allies, not in this town and certainly not in his boardinghouse, and so his decision to let the man down is an easy one. He himself was not made for conflict, and he was not made for war. He was made to skirt along the edges and keep to his faith; to weather this storm like any other that spilled over this land, and he will not break his mold simply because of one rogue agent. 

It means nothing that they have two more games to play: it means nothing that Robert lies awake long into the night, staring at the wood-cracked ceiling and waiting for the familiar intrusion of Woodhull's footfalls to find their way up the stairs again. The war will end or the madman from Setauket will grow weary of failure and vacate his room for good — one or the other must come sooner or later, and patience is a virtue he is staunchly determined to uphold.

-

As it is, morning crawls back before anyone else does.

Robert dresses with some strange, stiff anxiety, readying for the day feeling like an actor playing a tired part for too long. He slept badly and brokenly, waking at the return of drunkards and soldiers, but not once hearing the former farmer. He drifts past the man's room forcing his air of usual apathy, pausing only to rap on the door twice. He knocks again with bated breath, ears piqued for the rustling of bedsheets or the scrawling of a quill and the shifting of papers, but there is nothing: absolutely nothing, and the silence seems deafening as he turns from the threshold and makes his way downstairs.

There are the common frequenters, there are new tenants and his father, but there is no Woodhull.

He busies himself with serving breakfast to his patrons, going about it with more formal rigidity than usual, putting it down to his poor rest. There is nothing among the conversation amidst the tavern that speaks of anything amiss. All he hears is lewd talk of women and the latest privateer's illegally shuffled goods from ransacked Whiggish homes in Connecticut, none of it meriting the attention he finds himself wanting to give. It's only when his father draws him aside that he realizes he has served several meals to the wrong lodgers — shoddy service that he himself would never tolerate.

"You keep looking to the door," his father says once they are alone in the kitchen. His gaze is furtive and subtle, and yet there is a knot to his brows that speaks of strain. "But I don't believe he's coming back."

Robert's mouth goes very dry, fighting to manage an unconcerned: "Who?"

It is a pretense of dispassion that his father won't tolerate, and an act that has him jerked gently by the shoulders once as if to wake a late sleeper. "You may play games with Mr. Woodhull, my son, but not with me. He's been out all hours with nothing but the clothes on his back — do you truly think he would leave that evidence of his unattended in the daylight?"

Robert swallows carefully, refusing to meet his father's eye. There is porridge cooking over the hearth for a hungry captain, but he finds he cannot move to keep it from burning. Samuel releases the heaviest of sighs and goes to finish the man's order for him, leaving his son frozen by the silverware. Woodhull could be bleeding in an alleyway, robbed of his coin and life and they wouldn't know it. He could be in a cold rebel cell, he could be on the scaffolding beneath a hanging tree — he could be anywhere dead or dying, and they would not know.

"Our erstwhile guest," Robert finally forces out between clenched teeth, "is probably traipsing around a fish market right now waiting for a decent catch of soldiers' talk — or he could be seeking to break his fast elsewhere. Perhaps he's finally lost his appetite for those eggs of his."

This time he catches his father's glance, and the disapproval in it stings as much as it did when he was young, bloodied and beaten by the village boys because he had refused to fight back. Samuel had been the one to break up the bullying; he had been the one to patch up his wounds, gentle in his ministrations but unable to understand why he had not defended himself. _I won't be like them,_ Robert recalls choking out past the humiliated burn in his throat. _I won't_.

"I think we both know that boy will never lose that appetite," his father says sternly, but there is a sad gleam to his eye that burns too bright. "Dead or captured — I doubt they could tear it from him even then." And here he takes a pause, his shrewd glance making the manipulation clear before it comes, and yet Robert still finds it strikes as a blow when he hears: "If only I had raised a son with such conviction."

Having dealt his say, Samuel Townsend leaves Robert with the muffled sounds of the dining room without and the silence in his heart within, his pulse frigid in its beat. Magistrate Woodhull would disagree with his father, of that he is certain, and yet such rationalization makes the heaviness pressing over his chest all the worse. _I used to be just like you,_ Woodhull had hissed in his ear, _and it sickens me now._

The echo of those words grow louder as the day persists, and the memory pushes him to Abraham's empty room come the idle hours of the afternoon. He slides the key in and half-expects the man to be hunched over the desk with his schemes spread out beneath him and a laughable excuse on his tongue, but the chamber is still, nothing but still smoking ash spread in the hearth. Something in his gut aches too much like disappointment, but Robert pays the foolish sentiment no mind, shutting the door behind him carefully and observing, then, whatever may be left.

There is a stillness over the furnishings that makes him angry, and he wonders if he looks at a dead man's belongings — if he is folding up a dead man's nightshirt and opening a dead man's rucksack. It bothers him more than it ought to, and he begins to methodically pack away Woodhull's belongings, making some order out of the chaos he'd left it in. There are crumpled up papers scrawled with nonsense; a quill hastily set down near a teetering pot of ink. He lowers down to sit on the unmade bed to read through the discarded parchment, and a picture of the fool's late night activities begins to slowly piece itself together.

There is enough evidence here to hang a man, and Robert holds it in his hands once again, this proof of the desperation he'd heard pitched high in Woodhull's voice before he'd been told a frank _no_. It is incrimination held between his fingertips just like the browned egg; it is incrimination that is soon being fed to the flames of a newly stoked fire, soon as gone as the man who wrote them.

Below the creaking floorboards he can hear patrons gathering for supper, boisterous laughter and conversation meaningless to him. His father is clinking around with the pots, and the smell of chicken roasting on the spit is wafting in through the crack in the door. He waits until the embers of parchment have dwindled down to dust, and then takes every single one of Woodhull's personal effects and brings them to his own room. 

He hides the man's secrets in a chest of his own, stuffing it down beneath linen and dust. Woodhull may not return, but others will: if not the law, then his family — his father, the wife Robert knows him to have. And if any one of them wishes for the truth, they will not get it from him.

-

"He did nothing but ask for it," Robert says two nights later, some hours after Cunningham's men have come and gone. They sacked Woodhull's room and found nothing. They questioned both Robert and his father and found nothing, but a lack of evidence has never been enough to keep one from the hanging rope. If anything, it's a reason for it — to smother ambiguity and save his Majesty's coffer another shilling. It was by sheer luck — negligence, perhaps — that they did not think to check the innkeeper's room or his son's. Samuel Townsend had put on such a startled show that it was difficult for even Robert to believe the old man had a stake in the spy's game in the first place, his pretense over the horror of a _rebel_ spy in their midst nearly amusingly convincing. But here, surrounded by naught but the hush of midnight and the silence of a boardinghouse asleep, the truth in his grief can be seen on every wrinkle on his father's face.

"Then I do the same," his father says, resting wearily on his cane and staring into the last hearth still lit. He is silent while that light flickers weakly, and Robert gives his attention to his ale until he feels the weight of his father's gaze on his own, measuring and studying. For all the expertise he has in hiding from the world, there is very little he can obscure from those knowing eyes. Meaningfully, his father leans forward, something suspiciously like pride in his voice when he again speaks. "As do _you_."

Setting down his goblet, Robert stares at the draughts set in front of him, unable to keep himself from remembering the glinting danger in Woodhull's eye when he'd challenged him to their first match. "I do nothing but ask for the peace to run this business of ours," he says, smiling briefly and painfully in a dark slant of humor. "Or as near to peace as these troubled times will allow."

"I'm certain that's true, my boy," his father says far too indulgently, the tone treading mockery Robert would find insulting if he wasn't so damnably _tired_. "But that isn't quite what Woodhull believed. It isn't what _I_ believe." His voice lowers a pitch as he makes to hobble into rising, his hand falling to Robert's shoulder to squeeze. "I expect you'll be wanting to move his belongings somewhere more inconspicuous — come morning I'll see what we can do about that."

Robert lets his lids drift shut as his father makes his way up the stairs, following the sound of his footsteps until the creaking of the bedstead heralds a quiet dark and deep. His eyes sting with he tells himself is weariness alone as he opens them to look at the vacant chair in front of him, the game between them sitting suspended. Reaching forward, he deliberates for a moment and then makes the turn he owes, putting an ordinary piece well in the grasp of Woodhull's king.

There, predictably, is no one there to take it.

It is nearly dawn by the time Robert stands, his aching head protesting at the movement, exhausted joints giving him no mercy. He wonders how cold the rebel prison is. He wonders if Woodhull is regretting his choices or if he is resolute in it. He wonders if the man is prepared to pay the price for treason — and he wonders if he himself could ever be prepared to do the same.

Watching the weak winter morning light pour over the tables, Robert listens to the city come alive again, waiting, still, for the door to open upon a face he doesn't know if he hopes or dreads to see. But there is nothing but the bustle of peddlers with their wares bustling over broken cobblestone melding with the early drills of the King's men, and so it is to an empty room that he turns his back on, his heart heavy and hollow to leave a worthy game unplayed.

-

Of Woodhull, nothing is heard for weeks.

The days pass in the dull monotone of winter, Christmas and Epiphany celebrations quiet and subdued in the occupied city. Robert himself finds he is trapped in what seems a persistent melancholy, missing his sisters and missing the windswept freedom of the Sound's shorelines. He and his father do not observe the festivities in accordance with their faith, but Samuel barters pork for the occasion, an indulgence that would have Friends at the Meeting lifting their nose at. Robert himself serves much and eats little, his appetite having been chased out with Woodhull. The man is never quite far from his thoughts busy as they are — every time the bitter wind howls he thinks of the shoddy walls of old sugar houses turned to prisons; with every regular stationed in the boarding house he feels his heart contract in disgust that was never quite present before. Even after each trace of Abraham's belongings are gone and stored in the family home at Oyster Bay (save for the most damning item of all, of which he keeps for himself; a small vial he still scoffs to think could be the fabled invisible ink), the memory of him is a lingering ghost that haunts. It would be easy — realistic, even — to think the man dead, but an Irish warden dispels that fear of Robert's one January evening.

He at first doesn't realize the soldier is a guard: he is in civilian clothing, ragged and careworn, the shadows under his eyes lined deep. He asks for a meal and board and Robert grants it to him, they the only two in the dining room at the hour of eight. His company hunches down in his jacket and shovels the weak broth and scraps of sow meat left, his stare soon growing glassy with drink. Robert pretends to be working on the ledger when watching him warily from the corners of his gaze, knowing full well how men can get when far in their cups, even those solitarily lost in their misery.

"Innkeeper," calls out the Irishman drunkenly as the night grows dark. His head is resting to the side on the table, and Robert rises to tug his dirtied plate out from under the man's hair with distaste. An unsteady hand pats the wood next to his emptied mug, a blatant enough request for more.

"I doubt you'd notice the difference," Robert says flatly, returning behind his counter with the dish and tankard both. "I'd find your bed were I you, sir." 

The man is quiet for some time — so long that Robert thinks him asleep — but his chair soon scrapes against the floor and he rises, making a stumbling show of an advance. Robert doesn't look up even when work-weathered hands slam against his papers, shielding the comforting order of those numbers and letters from view. It's not the first time he'd dealt with an aggressor, but before Woodhull he always retreated to skulk away in the shadows. Now, for reasons he cannot yet explain, he does not.

"What gives _you_ a pass, eh?" the drunkard asks, so close he can smell the stench of rum on his breath, a commodity he must have poured down his throat before coming here. "You're of an age to fight — for the crown, for the rebels, for yourself. Anything, anyone, and yet here you are, tucked in away from the horrors of this blasted war. Men I know would _kill_ to be in your tidy little boots. I know I would."

Robert maintains a studied picture of blankness on his face, refusing to give the man an inch. Woodhull wasn't a soldier, but no, he is coming to believe that hadn't made him a coward. "Will that be all, sir? Or shall I let your room out to someone else?"

The soldier is so stiff and still that Robert believes him to be poised for an attack, but it never comes. The man laughs instead, thumping the counter once and then leaning back. It's only then that he notices the glint of gold at his ring finger, a well-made and simple band, engraved somewhat clumsily as another given name was inscribed over the original: Abraham in place of Thomas, Mary enjoining it. The man is a fool to be wearing it so deep in the city, but then so was its owner.

"Where did you get that?"

The question is sharper than he means it to be, but the man is so inebriated that he hardly seems to notice the edge. He follows Robert's gaze to the ring, spinning it about his finger with a swiftly distracted air of satisfaction. "From one of the poor sods I stand watch over. He didn't need it where he was going," the man states, no longer quite so threatening. "I'm going to sell it tomorrow and make a pretty pence for passage out of here. The sooner I leave these miserable colonies, all the better for—"

"You rob the dead, do you?" Robert interrupts him impatiently, every muscle in his frame tightly bound up, his stomach a sudden storm of dread. He shouldn't care. He _doesn't_ care, damn him, but —

"No," one word — one word is all it is, and the weight of it is enough to make his knees tremble, his heartbeat pounding loud enough to nearly drown the man out as he goes on. "No, not yet, but soon, God willing. That one's got the jailer in a right mess — he's a spy, that's plain as day, but he's claiming the oyster major of Setauket set him up on such a mission. His father's got no idea what he's on about, the Major himself is missing, and the shite won't do us all a favor and _die_. Consideration these days is so _scarce_ , y'see." He pauses, chuckling once without humor, staring into a point of space Robert cannot see, something haunted in that bleak regard. "...What a terrible time we've come to, waiting on men to keel over and leave the world. My mam would be right horrified, she would."

Throughout the course of his speech the man has gone from elated for his riches to miserable at the reminder of his acquiring of it, and Robert steps in the back but briefly to open a barrel of port. The guard has a conscience, and that — _that_ , as Woodhull taught him, is something to be taken advantage of. 

He fills up the man's mug this time with a richer brew and pours one for himself, earning what appears to be his intoxicated respect. "Please accept my apologies, sir. I'm meant to be partial in accordance with my faith, but I cannot but help to see how men like you are necessary in this conflict. To see the humanity amidst the struggle, why, I toast to that." Raising his glass, Robert gives the Irishman a tight-lipped smile, grateful indeed that it is likely he won't recall a whit of this encounter come morning. "Now tell me, where do you find your employment? I like to avoid the stench of such places, you see, and I am _certain_ you more than understand that..."

-

The prison keeping Woodhull is halfway across York City from his own establishment, a ghost of a sugar house established north of the Commons used before the war to store dry goods. Robert's path traces the remnants of rebel fire that had scorched his prior lodgings and all of his belongings there, the grinding marks of canon retreat melding into the snow dirty with ash and waste. The air is brisk and more enlivening than its ever been, perhaps because of the enormity of the risk he is taking. Death has always lingered everywhere and anywhere in the shadows, but he is seeking it out openly now.

Moving through the streets with a bible held to his chest and his clothes as dark as a clergyman's, he is allowed to pass largely unmolested and unbothered, being a man of God the only shield worth pretending in a city like this. He is a liar, and likely a damned one, but not a soul he crosses believes it of him. His father had claimed shortly before his departure through the back end of the alley that he was doing no more than following his inner light: he was seeking the truth even if it was through dishonesty, and any true Friend would forgive him for a transgression taken in the name of their faith.

Robert thought the old man's reasoning horse shite then and thinks it horse shite now, but the decision remains his own: he'd needed no God or no father to tell him what to do after the drunken guard had told him the whole of it, and that much he has made peace with.

He is permitted through the guarded gates merely on his word, and it is all he can do to keep from retching once within the confines of the prison. The stench is unbearable, an unholy mixture of unwashed bodies and sickness, madness and blood. The man he is taken to is a detestable character, slouched back with the disgust for his position and his prisoners written plainly enough on his pinched face.

"What could a man of God," he asks with a mean laugh around his words, "possibly want in a pit of Hell?"

"I am charged," Robert begins with humbleness not his own, "by magistrate Richard Woodhull to bring his son the Lord's counsel. I am certain he told you of this wish before departing on his last visit."

The one named Yates raises a single brow, looking unperturbed otherwise. "Woodhull said nothing about a reverend. He said his son needed God, but—"

"He meant he needed me," Robert cuts in, and at least in this he knows he does not lie. "I met Magistrate Woodhull on his return back to Setauket, and he was concerned—" Lowering his voice and bowing his head, his hand shifts over the back of the unassuming bible in his grasp. His mother's: the only belonging of hers he'd allowed himself to keep after she was gone, and by God he hopes she is looking out for him now. "He was concerned, sir, that to read the man his last rites would be prudent. His son's health, I am told, is fragile."

Yates scrutinizes him for a long moment, likely seeing the holes gaping wide open in such a sad tale, but too burdened with other duties, Robert prays desperately, think into it further. He waves a hand towards the stairs below, the incline of which is steep, the darkness at the foot brooking no light. The man looks all too smug to relinquish him to it, and Robert understands that this mercy isn't mercy at all — it is the desire to see a sheep tossed down to the wolves.

Robert turns his back on him, finding he can stand no longer to look at that insufferable smirk, and descends into the devil's den before he can change his own mind.

If he thought the odor above overpowering, this is worse: it is not just the scent of frozen filth, but of death and the dying, of defeat and the rancor of life at it's end. It takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the dark of the cells, but once they do, he sees only hoards of shadows, men huddled in scattered groups or sulking on their own, one rocking back and forth on the haunches of his feet, his hands pressed over his ears. The cold is devouring even for one fully clothed, and Robert thinks it no wonder that the Irishman had been scarred so. He, strictly adhering to the tenets of his faith, had never largely considered the concept of Hell the warden claimed this place to be, but this, he imagines, is the closest he will get to such a netherworld in the land of the living.

A hand struggles to grip at his sleeve, and Robert stills the urge to flinch in his bones. At his side is no more than a boy, hardly old enough to grow a beard. He has a bruise on his jaw and a tooth knocked out in the front, a swollen eye and a skewed smile. "Could you read me a psalm, sir? It's dark in here, see, and they took away my own Bible, the text of which I am faithfully devoted, so—"

"Oh, give it up, Weaver. Pick the man's pockets and be done with it, little good though it'll do you here," a voice rough with sick calls out from the back of the room, and Robert _knows_ it. For the first time since leaving the illusory safety of the boardinghouse, he falters. It is a foolish thing he has done, but no one and nothing can save him now.

Drawing a hard loaf of bread from his pocket, he hands it to the boy, knowing full well the eyes of every prisoner have latched onto that morsel of food like the guts of a pheasant to the nose of a bloodhound. Guilt is churning in his stomach, a frequent enough occurrence now that he cleanly ignores it and steps back, allowing the riot he's all but incited to run its course. The loaf is snatched from the boy's grasp and passed between at least ten pairs of hands before a fight breaks out, all gathered in a crowd of violence save for one. Robert turns and he is there, the tormentor of his conscience before him, a slight shivering wasted mess, the recognition not on the weary lines of his scruffy face but in the glazed light of his eyes. He is alive: he is alive, and it takes longer than Robert likes to find speech again.

"Mr. Woodhull — we've met once before," he says lowly, tone full of implication and doublemeaning only the man before him will understand if he has wits enough. "Through your father, I believe, long back in Oyster Bay. I've come on his behalf."

His index finger taps at the cover to the bible still held to his chest once, taking Woodhull's singular attention to it. The man seems to barely be able to speak, and Robert is struck to see streaks of wetness cutting through the grime on his cheeks, an uncomfortably vulnerable show of bewilderment creasing at his brows. He is nearly afraid Woodhull will give them both up here and now — he does not look _well_ , and hasn’t weakness always lent itself badly to subtlety?

"...Robert?" Woodhull croaks out, so hoarse that he prays the guard intervening in the squabbling behind them did not hear. Robert takes himself a step closer, some measure of pleading, he hopes, visible enough on his neutrally arranged features. _Don't dare to crumble yet_.

"I'm afraid you're mistaken," he says quietly and carefully, knowing at last that here — in this ungodly cesspool where the consequences of man's flaws are cast in light for him to see — he has found some measure of the truth, as his father had said he would. In the tremble of Woodhull's hands and the dark bruises beneath his eyes is the clearest sign he has set sight on yet: God would not sanction this war; the divine did not mean for such suffering. Creation was not _made_ for this.

"It's Culper." Robert nearly whispers the words, but the slackness to Woodhull's jaw all but confirms he has not gone unheard. He's read what Woodhull left behind between the bound pages of his law books — he's scoured the scrawled text for sense, he's studied everything between the lines and unraveled what he could of this man's web thread by thread. There had been a name written on one dog-eared page of a treatise with a mark of a question beside it, and Robert knew then it was his. Drawing a breath before giving the decision that perhaps has already ruined him, his pointed gaze finds Woodhull and for once, he is brave.

"Culper Junior," he murmurs, "as you wished it."

Washington, surely, would shudder at the name being spoken in an avenue so public, but the din around them swallows the confession out. Woodhull seems, for once in his accursed life, lost for words, some strangled noise making its way out of a throat sounding parched for water, thickened with emotion that would ignite pity in any living being's soul. A rustle by Robert's shoulder saves them both, and a guard — one, maybe, who'd replaced the fled Irishman — steps in between them, eying Woodhull with a healthy dose of mistrust.

"Sir — I don't know what Yates was thinking, letting you on down here, but—"

"I've come to give Mr. Woodhull spiritual counsel, as per magistrate Woodhull's request," Robert informs him, gesturing to the shaking creature before them both. "Isn't that right, sir?"

Woodhull gathers what is left of his wits and stands straighter, nodding furiously along with the game. "I know the reverend," he confirms, breaking off to cough into his dirtied sleeve. "I — I'd like to speak with him, if we could be given a space quieter than this."

The guard visibly hesitates, but Robert catches at his sleeve before his doubts can go further, guiding the man to turn with him away from Woodhull. So very lowly, as if wanting to shield the prisoner away from the uglier truth, he proposes: "Should he confess to his crimes, you and I could _both_ stand to reap the reward."

It is not what a devoted man of God would say, but corruption has planted its seeds everywhere, and the guard knows it. Deliberating it for the second it likely takes to imagine a fat pouch of coin in his hand, he nods sharply, jerking his head towards an entryway in the back. Leading them both to it, Robert enters with the rasp of Woodhull's breath and the drag of his feet at his back. The guard departs with an incline of his head, his gaze shifting surreptitiously between the potential makers of his fortune before the rickety door shuts behind him. The room is sparse and chilled, the shackles on the wall speaking of a far less savory use for its space otherwise. Through the walls of stone seeps the winter wind, though Woodhull's shoulders don't hunch against it — save for the tremors wracking that frame of his, he seems all but numb to its severity. A silence falls, broken only by the dwindling disputes outside. Woodhull appears to attempt to speak and then stop himself several times, approaching and then falling back, his hand pressed up to his face and then raking back through his hair. Robert stands still all the while, having never been one to make the first play.

"Robert," Abraham breathes out, "what — what is this?"

He knows very little of what to say now that he is here, and words, for a prolonged moment, are at a loss on his tongue. He knows what he came here to decide, but not what he came to do.

"I'd appreciate if you did not call me that here," he says, looking up towards the singular window perched high amid the rafters, for he thinks the sight may pain him less. "As I already run the risk of being questioned and recognized."

"You run the _risk_ —" Woodhull begins to echo, but then the man is on him in a second, his quivering fingers gripping at the sleeves of his coat, jerking him forward and back again with surprising force for one so threadbare. The bible drops from his startled hands, its pages splaying out on the near frozen ground between them. "Robert, why the _hell_ —"

He breaks off in a torrent of coughs, his shoulders heaving and his harsh grasp loosening as he turns his face away, hacking until he is left shaking and gasping for breath. Robert understands very little of the force that guides him to keep Woodhull steady, but his hands have found the man's shoulders, bearing what weight he cannot.

"Stop," Robert hisses more failed speech stumbles on Woodhull's tongue, all nothing more than broken wheezing. " _Stop_."

He follows Woodhull as he sinks to the floor in a crouch, fingers that are much thinner than he recalls clutching at the sleeves to his coat, his ragged face turned to the side until the fit ebbs. Woodhull heaves in as much breath as he can take, and it's then when Robert takes out a skein of water from the folds of his jacket, holding out a shred of mercy to a sick fool whose hands tremble too much to hold it steady. Water trickles onto his thin garments and onto the dirty ground, a waste until Robert swats those crooked digits away and saves them both the trouble.

"Don't be an idiot," he says quietly yet firmly, and the stubborn defiance in Woodhull's eyes fades into something he cannot read as he tips the pouch back to the man's lips, dropping the gaze affixed upon him shortly after. Woodhull drinks like he's never before seen water, and Robert allows him to until all he'd filled from the muddy well this morning is gone. Even when he lowers the skein away the space between them seems no less suffocating; he can almost imagine the draft is Woodhull's breath against his cheek, and the fingers at his arm tighten into a grip Robert thinks he'd have little luck pulling away from even if he wished to. Woodhull is staring, but Robert does not return the regard, afraid of what he'll see there if he does.

"Robert," Woodhull says lowly, in that same tone he'd used in Robert's own bedroom; desperation just barely within control. "I'm going to ask you again — what the _hell_ is this?"

"You know what this is," Robert returns brusquely, disliking the rawness to his own voice that betrays the flat edge he'd prefer to keep. "I've come to hear your confession."

Abe's grasp on his arms jerks Robert closer, so near that their foreheads meet. "No," Abe insists, his palm reaching for the back of Robert's head, not seeming to care that the touch is met with visible bristling. "No, no more games, remember? I think you've come to give me _yours_."

He has toiled upon the middle ground for too long.

He knows it. His father knows it. _Abe_ knows it, and the world around them does too. Robert has always counted one of his own virtues as being a man of logic and sense; of sound thought and pragmatic principles, but those very morals have failed him in this instance, and worse, failed the man in loose chains before him.

"I've come to do what you _wished_ for me to do. Your little spy game; I'll cast my lot and my life into it, I'll be your man in New York City: that is my confession, and now you have heard it. Is that not enough for you?" Robert shoves at Abraham’s shoulders as he hisses the words out, but Woodhull's own grip refuses to relent, proving to be as obstinate as the man himself. He is staring still, and Robert's gaze strays to those mad, overbright eyes, finding it difficult to look away. Woodhull has changed, and not just by the new sharpness of an already lean face — if the wardens thought his stint in this miserable place would have broken Abraham, they are wrong. Instead they have wrought themselves something much more dangerous; a wounded animal not willing to go down without a fight.

"Why?" Woodhull demands quietly when their mutual study of one another is broken, leaving Robert to wonder what he could have so foolishly left open on his features for the other man to see. 

" _Why_?" Robert starts impatiently, "I've told you—"

"No, no — you haven't, all right?" Woodhull's voice has taken on a new rawness, revealing weakness that Robert no longer wishes to use against him. "I know what changed my mind, Robert, and that was blood on my hands. Now what's changed yours?"

Robert ceases his attempts in trying to push Woodhull, his hands growing still at the cuffs of his filthy shirt. The answer to Woodhull's question is all around them; it is in the grime of the floors and the packed chamber of shivering, starving men to their left — it is in the tattered shreds of this boy who once played at being a man, who once played at being a spy. Robert thinks that game of his is over; that the pretender has at last, in a stroke of brilliant irony, become what he feigned to be.

"Blood," Robert says thickly, despairing of the waver in his voice Woodhull will surely hear, "on _my_ hands."

Woodhull laughs hollowly, perhaps imagining awful events that could have transpired in his absence to fuel a pacifist so: a father's death, a sister's, a cousin, a child — when it is likely the last person he may expect. "Whose?"

"Yours."

" _Mine_." Again Woodhull laughs, this time unable to comprehend the truth. Abe's hands shift to his face, taking it between his two palms regardless of how Robert stiffens, his fingers going to the man's bony wrists. It is a desperate, plying grip Woodhull has him in, his chains clinking with the movement, creaking with the very reminder of where they are.

"I," Woodhull says very slowly, shaking him by the slightest as if to drive the point within, "am _not_ dead, Robert. I've kept up my cover _here_ to come back for _you_ — do you understand what I have _done_ to—"

"You'd not be here at all," Robert cuts in, "if I had agreed to your terms in the first place."

That is a fact neither of them can dispute, but Woodhull visibly does not blame him for it. What Robert reads in the silence is understanding, and what he sees in the tired pits of the other man's eyes is a soft kind of sympathy. That frightens him, perhaps, far more than any recrimination would, but before he can pull himself out of Woodhull's hold, those hands grip him nearer. _I used to be just like you._

"You're here now, Townsend," Abraham says, and beneath the pads of his fingers, that chilled skin turns warm. The corner of Woodhull's mouth lifts by just the slightest, the smile touched by a sadness Robert can't reach. "I'd say that's what matters now, wouldn't you?"

The answer isn't an easy one, not when Woodhull could just as likely die here as he could one day walk free: Robert could leave this place today and never see him again, living with the haunting assurance for the rest of his life that _he_ was an instrumental piece in one man's downfall. That, in part, is why he does not outright shove him away when the touch comes.

The frigid hands on his face begin to stroke over the bones in his cheek and trace the line of his jaw, and Robert's thumb presses to the underside of Woodhull's wrist likely to the point of pain, a warning, a question. He wants to believe the man is delirious to dare caress him so, but awareness is present on every line of his face, a concentrated crease to his brow. Robert allows him this, having no strength within him to refuse one who lives now on borrowed time, his body kept rigid and still until one of Woodhull's fingers crosses over his lips. Robert's gaze cuts to him so sharply that the touch falls away, leaving his stomach lurching not unpleasantly without knowing the reason why.

"I don't know what it is you're starved for, Woodhull," Robert says, his voice strange and hoarse. "But you'll not get it from me."

Woodhull is quiet, watching him, searching doubtlessly for signs of disgust or revulsion when he will find none of that, and it does not escape Robert's notice that there is still a palm cupping his neck, thumb warmly positioned to brush over his pulse point. He has a wife at home. A child too he assumes, but Robert has little idea why his mind is suddenly supplying these paltry facts. Temptation is a terrible thing, and he has done his best to avoid those sinful talons every day of his devout existence, but Woodhull is dragging him into a world in which there are no scruples or boundaries or limits. This — the hands on his face, the thumb at his mouth — is just yet another inch of darkness cast upon the shadow Abraham is engulfing him in. And it will, admittedly, be a long while before he questions why that darkness feels so much like _light_.

"All right," Woodhull gives him, his voice hushed, placating, as if it's comfort he means to grant. Comfort to not his redeemer but the very source of his damnation, and a persistent lump rises in Robert's throat, all too miserably aware of his own regret, so much that he chokes out a hollow laugh when Abraham carries on with his assurances, voice pitched low —"All right, Robert. All right."

The man moves to take his hands away, and yet Robert catches his palm between his own, cradling the chilled skin there without an ounce of self-awareness as to what it is he is _doing_. What could he say? What could he possibly say that would last in this barren place, that would hold any miniscule value of promise when he is gone? Fumbling with his words and avoiding the gaze on him that suddenly burns, Robert draws an unsteady breath and releases it, staying like that for what feels a very long time. Chains clink outside the door, some men groaning and others jeering, curses and low conversation heard over their own silence. They must have minutes left, at best, seconds at worst. The warden would not allow such solitude to go on a suspicious length, no matter how high the promise of coin in the end.

"I'll return here," Robert finally brings himself to say, feeling the shiver in Abe's lithe fingertips as they grip onto his, his knuckles surely bonier than they were when he was brought here first. "I'll bring you food, water, anything that you—"

"No," Abe is quick to insist, "No, you'll not come back here again, not when I know Yates must have his eye on you as it is. My wife, Mary, she—" He cuts off abruptly, his features wavering in something like grief so soft that Robert wonders if he truly does love her — if this woman in Setauket was indeed worth it. A stone settles in his stomach then, a weighty one, and he does not understand it. "She sends provisions every week without fail. You needn't worry there."

There is partial dishonesty etched across his face, and he can guess easily enough what it is. Whatever food and clothing received is not given to Abraham; it is likely sold to the highest bidding privateer, those proceeds then spent as the man upstairs pleases. For all Robert wants to dispute Abe's insistence, he sees the potential wisdom in it. If the jailer himself makes a profit from Abraham's existence, it is at least a hollow excuse to keep him alive if the chill of winter doesn't take him first.

"I wasn't worried." Robert lies through his teeth, attempting to place distance between them that is no longer there. "I—"

"Robert," he hears Abe reason even if his gaze has fallen away, disheartened in a way he cannot put to speech. It may very well be that he will never see Woodhull again after this: it may be that his own contrariety has as good as condemned a man to death, and he never thought guilt could weigh so heavily on any soul. "Listen to me — once I'm freed from this place, I will come and find you. Do you understand?"

Robert does not say yes; he will not lie to him in this, but it is the murmur of authoritative voices out the door that has him spurring into action, raising those hands he clasps until a fierce and furious kiss is given to cold knuckles. Later, he may regret that, but action here might just speak louder than word. " _Live_." The command is given on a broken breath, and one look at his face confirms Abraham is too shocked by the impulsive contact to speak at all. "Live through this, and I will be waiting. You have my word on that, Abraham, you—" He moves to stumble to his feet when the sound of the unbarring of the door sounds, taking the Bible in one hand and Abe's wrist in the other. The man sways a little when they are upright and onto him, his shackled hands trapped between them at Robert's chest. Abe's buries his face into his neck for the briefest of moments, his scruff tickling skin and the brush of lips tingling at his throat. 

"I will have my eyes and ears open," Robert whispers close to his ear, steadying him and placing the Bible between them. This is what the guard will see: a man on the verge of a confession, though he will never know whose. "And you and I will see this war through."

He only catches a glimpse of Woodhull before the warden looms in the doorway, but there is a light in his eyes, then: the sort that burns in his memory the second he sees it. Hope. It is hope, and Robert prays to the as-yet silent God above that it will be enough to save both their souls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in part two: robert goes home, caleb brewster pays a visit, and abe's not playing games.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so it’s been more than a literal year since i posted the first part of this, and now on the day of the turn finale part 2 is finally, finally up like the procrastinator i am. thank you so so much for the feedback, i hope everyone enjoys the last part of this beautiful show tonight that i will be so sad to see go. <3333 don’t have many notes here except to say it’s a bit rambly! canon divergent after ep 2.05.

A patient man: so much is what Robert Townsend had once prided himself upon being, but in the weeks following his visit to the prison forbearance is a thread ever running thin. He runs his establishment as he always has, strict on expenses and sensible in his management, and yet he keeps a vigilant eye out for the neat press of a red coat, attentions piqued when his Majesty's men are about. _Troop numbers, ship numbers, anything that you hear ranked from a King's officer or higher._ He has made extensive note of all, the quantities stored away in his head in an orderly manner along with his calculations of his lodger's bills, waiting only for a conspiratorial ear to convey every secret into.

He does not think of Woodhull. He is very cautious of that, informing his father of only the barest of details on the man’s front. Robert outlines the visit for the elder Townsend on the far side of midnight when all in the boarding house is again silent and still, informing him their errant spy is alive but not quite not well; suffering but staunchly determined to live. He describes the conditions of the prison with distaste, gives a shaming sketch of the detestable character who reigns in those walls, and despairs over the grime of humanity's very worst — he tells his father all of this and more, but he does not speak of the memories that keep him awake long into the night, no more than hands of a ghost skimming over his skin, chilled with the closeness of death. That much he keeps carefully to himself, unwilling and unwanting to think on what any of it could mean.

"Promise me you will be _careful_ , Robert." It is his father who draws him out of his thoughts, the warm squeeze to his shoulder blocking out the echo of a more frigid touch. He can make all the promises he likes, yes, but they both know that won’t save him from the noose were it ever tightened around his neck.

This is what his father wanted: this is what Abraham and, as Robert is coming to see, his own inner light has pushed him towards, the Lord perhaps giving his blessing in those hollow walls of the sugar house, a sure enough sign where justice prevailed and where it did not. He’d overheard a reading of Paine’s pamphlet when the city had been beneath rebel control, and had forced himself under great strain to suffer no reaction at all, putting his mind instead to his faith’s call to neutrality. But now, at last, he think he may understand the speech cried out by that orator. _Time makes more converts than reason,_ Paine’s words had claimed, and how true it had been for him.

He’d waited long enough.

Blinking, Robert rubs at his tired eyes, his father’s face coming back to focus. Suddenly, the man looks older than his years, a thousand anxious thoughts spinning behind that creased brow. The elder Townsend may have pushed him towards this outcome, but now the reality of it is here — Robert wonders if he regrets any of it at all.

“You know I’d not take any risk too great,” Robert assures, but the words as they leave him feel like a lie.

It is shallow comfort to give in the face of the magnitude of his treasonous decision when a similar man of his undertaking is rotting away in an airless cell, and yet there is no more to do than bide their time. And that is what Robert does to the best of his ability as the days slide by, each longer than the rest as Washington’s army starves in the valleys of Pennsylvania while Howe’s feasts on finery in Philadelphia, the news as sluggish and miserable as the season itself.

Once they have dug themselves out of a snowstorm which brings New York to a grinding halt, his father returns to Oyster Bay to see to his merchant interests in local seaports. Robert watches his steed trundle to the Brooklyn Ferry to lift his hand in farewell, making his path back to the Bowery in a roundabout way. Woodhull had told him never to return here, and yet before long he finds himself before the sugar house, lingering behind a courier’s shivering horse. There is nothing changed in the sight save for a cart positioned outside to carry the starved and frozen bodies dragged out by guards, surrounded by a few civilians who rummage through what is left.

As the sun sinks into the horizon, only one woman remains, crouched low on the ground over a body with her hands tracing over the planes of a still face. She does not weep, but raises herself up from the dirty ground where her dress has caught upon the muck of snow and ice, gesturing to two men huddled by the nearest tavern. The dead prisoner is lifted to rest stiffly across a mount appearing half-starved, an animal likely more used to toiling the fields rather than stumbling over the loose cobblestones of a hard city. This woman, too, must be accustomed to the same, and perhaps had traveled across the looted countryside only to discover one loved to her wasted and far beyond any reach.

Once more, his mind wanders to Abraham’s wife. To Setauket, to the life left there behind. He wonders if she will one day trudge to the city on the same mission, and it sits upon him like a suffocating weight to think on what she would find. Even when those remaining gathered around the cart of the deceased disperse, he cannot bring himself to move. His feet are like lead, rooted to the spot and his chest aching with the unfamiliar sentiment of _giving_ a damn. He does not possess the courage to search through the number of dead for Abraham: he cannot bring himself to do it. Instead he wanders back to his boarding house at a trudging pace, uncertain as to when he’d come to loathe silence. There is no peace within it now, not as there once was before the heavy burden of Abraham Woodhull's life fell upon him.

Prayers seem useless as he settles into bed that evening, listening to the wind howl restlessly against the roof. A storm is moving in over the harbor, the chill of it slipping through every crack and crevice, enveloping him with creeping dread. He thinks of his father, and he thinks of his sisters. He thinks of every last innocent made to suffer the ugly hand of violence and aches for them all. _Let my family not be touched by this,_ he finds himself asking the hush of the night, and unsurprisingly, no answer comes. 

-

But the war, as it was bound to, comes home.

He is doling out the last of a tepid supply of ale to a pair of weathered navy-man when his door bursts open without ceremony, drawing all eyes to the young man in the doorway. He stands there panting, a letter held close to his chest, and it takes every ounce of Robert's self-control to keep himself steady, appearing unbothered by the sudden intrusion when his heart is fit to beat out of his chest. _I've been found out,_ is his first thought, despite how he'd not yet broken a single of the King's laws save for in his mind.

The sharp panic recedes, but leaves a fluttering of trepidation lingering within his chest. He knows this boy — the youngest of the Weekes family of Oyster Bay, the dutiful son of the owner of the grist mill. He and his father both rarely left the boundaries of the village, relying upon Samuel’s merchant investments to acquire goods from the city. With the elder Townsend home yet again, he’d have little reason to venture into New York’s filth unless — 

“Mr. Townsend,” the boy — Jeremiah, he recalls now — gulps out, stumbling forward and in behind the counter without pause. Robert draws his steps back and coaxes Jeremiah to do the same, away from the sudden keen eyes of his lodgers. “Mr. Townsend, I — Miss Sarah, she bade me come with all speed—”

The letter is pressed to his already shaking hands, a thousand anxieties eagerly darkening his mind, growing like afternoon’s lengthening shadows. He lives countless possibilities in a single moment, seeing already his father’s grave and feeling an echo of the very real, howling grief such a loss would bring. There are visions to follow just as awful — Phebe with a worsening winter sickness yet again, Audrey having been thrown from her beloved horse, and Sarah…

Sarah.

Robert’s fingertip runs along the edges of his sister’s scrawled script, as defiantly messed as it always had been. The roaring in his ears is too great to hear Jeremiah’s prattling, his senses too muddled to focus upon anything but the clumsy hold of a dinner knife in his hand, slicing through the drop of wax spilled upon the envelope until he unfolds the parchment within for himself.

He is unable to summon up even the quickest of prayers before reading. Whatever had transpired, providence had already acted — or, comes the rebellious thought, circumstance had. _Circumstance_ drove fates in the prisons; circumstance had taken his mother in her sickroom. It is a dangerous concept which would leave any truly pious man gaping, but Robert’s faith as of late, he’s found since witnessing the horror of the prisons, is a feeble and shakable thing.

And yet, as he tears through his sister’s correspondence, he finds that by God’s grace or another’s, his family had been spared the irreparable. _Our barn is no more, burned to ashes by the Queen's Rangers,_ is written: _Father is beaten, bruised, and in a state._ The rest of it he barely skims. He has gleaned enough from it to swiftly make his mind up, unable to remain here when those he loves most suffer so. _All is survivable_ , Sally had stressed. That is all that must matter.

The relief trembles through him in waves. But where the gratitude recedes, a colder fury sort of takes its place, the sort he’s never before felt with such intensity. His hand makes a fist around the letter, crinkling the paper around the edges, and it is only then he realizes Jeremiah is speaking still, offering assurance after assurance on his father’s health. Reaching into his pocket, Robert presses a coin to the boy’s palm, nodding towards the stairs around the corner.

“Get yourself a meal tonight, take a rest,” Robert tells him distractedly, already reaching for his coat and hat. He puts his affairs in order, placing the boarding house temporarily in the care of a Scotsman by the name of MacDougal who is himself eager to see himself in the business. There is little to instruct other than maintaining order, and as for Abraham — Robert leaves him his invoice should he return, having no means to put to paper what he would truly say to the man. The spoken word alone would do on that front, and even then he imagines it: he imagines Woodhull before him now, and believes his tongue would still find a way to be tied.

He heads to the ferry on foot, more assured to acquire swifter passage than if he’d brought along a horse, and is on the first boat out. The waves have the barge rocking from side to side, the outline of the city soon stolen by the early morning fog, the weak sunrise blurring the buildings and humble church steeples to the west. From this distance, New York almost appears peaceful — a traveler with no foreknowledge would likely never guess they were at war. He wishes, as one of his faith should, that they weren’t, and yet a question still nags at him: what sort of purpose would he find at peace?

-

He arrives in Oyster Bay after dusk.

It is a distracted hand that pays the traveling wheat farmer for his passage, a Hempstead man headed back home from selling his goods in the city. He’d been a companion too jovial for the dark cloud of anxiety hanging over Robert’s head through every checkpoint, bearing nothing on his person that would condemn him — yet — and wondering the whole while how Woodhull had done it. How he does it even now, playing the part of a loyal tory son within a prison for patriots. Robert’s memory of the thickness of the air in those enclosed walls and the city around it are exchanged for salt and brine the farther east they go, and yet a different sort of fear clutches his chest as they trundle into his town. He sees himself off the wagon before it even pulls to a stop, ducking into old paths he’d tread as a child towards the apple orchards bordering his home.

Smoke hangs in the air here, as Sally’s letter had suggested, and what’s worse, a number of the trees they made a small profit out of every autumn are downed, their sad stumps lining the hill overlooking the bay. The foundations of stacked wood appallingly close to his family’s cemetery look to be the beginnings of a fort, and the outrage in his chest burns brighter than before, brighter still when he catches sight of an older man hobbling out from his home.

He barely recognizes his father, but only because he has been fortunate in his life so far never to see him so injured. Like a boy, he runs up to him until he is close enough to draw him in a close embrace, his gaze falling past Samuel to see the evidence of their smoldering barn, utterly destroyed in the blaze which had claimed it. His father grips onto him just as tightly, and it is only then Robert realizes that he himself is shaking, out of surfacing anger or sheer anxiety or both he does not know.

“It would take more than a feeble pummeling to stop your old father, Robert,” Samuel is saying as he pulls back, his hands squeezing his son’s shoulders in a gesture of reassurance. His eye swells badly, and a cut seems to be sealing on his forehead. Robert can barely stomach it, about to tell him where exactly the perpetrators of such an act can go, but some yards a way a shadow in the doorway of their untouched homestead distracts him. His sister Sarah stands there, her arms crossed over her chest, her jaw set in the same sort of pain he feels. She inclines her head his way and he returns the gesture, her very presence a beacon of strength that has not once, throughout the whole of her young life, ever let him down.

Carefully, he guides his father back inside, his two other sisters greeting him as they make their way to the sitting room — Audrey with a somberness none too rare for her, and Phebe with usual boundless joy. There is a balance between them all that has lacked ever since his mother’s passing, but no matter the driving force behind his arrival, he’d missed this. He’d missed the chattering of his sisters and the quick banter between them all that had not dampened by the slightest despite the recent upheaval. His father certainly finds comfort within it the normalcy from where he rests in the sitting room, chuckling at this and that while his children go through the motions of fixing a late supper. Robert concedes to the insistence of his siblings that he sit and rest on account of his long journey, lowering himself to sit beside Samuel. There is a long stretch of silence between them as they judge what the sisters may be able to hear, and then his father speaks. 

“…News of Abraham?”

Robert fixates his gaze on an embroidery hanging on the wall; one his mother had stitched, a simple scene of the duck pond in late autumn near to their residence and a tree with leaves scattered beside it. He remembers sitting at her feet as she’d toiled on it slowly through a particularly frigid winter where he’d grown fidgety indoors, despairing at the snow piled high against the windows. What had she said to him then? _Mind the darkness not, for if thou do it will fill thee more_ , is the echo from long ago, no longer in his mother’s voice as he can barely recall the sound of it. _Stand still and act not, and wait in patience till light arise out of darkness to lead thee._

Such advice he wishes he had the fortitude to follow now.

“None,” Robert tells his father, moving to assist him with the cloth wrapped with ice he holds against a swelling eye. Not a word, and the frustration of not _knowing_ wears on him by the day. He is more prepared than ever now to throw himself into any use he could serve to spurn any cause of the King’s, but it means little at all with Woodhull’s absence. That he is so closely invested in the man’s survival alarms him. That he would not know how to carry on if he received news that the Setauket farmer had _died_ infuriates him. Even from miles away, Woodhull has a firm hold on his life. A grip as tight as the one he’d given him deep within the prison walls.

It isn’t until after the meal and their silent prayer that talk of the raid arises. Though Audrey has gone to lead their wearied father to bed, Phebe stitches by the fire, Sarah beside her, restlessly paging through a book she seems not to be reading at all. Robert himself is perched by the window, eying the dark rise of the hill for the return of soldierly threats. That they’d cleared the orchard is an ill sign for the coming year — anyone with an eye for battle could see that with a clear view of the bay, it would serve as the perfect fortified location.

“I don’t see why it should be so terrible were the Rangers to return,” Phebe is saying when Robert draws his attention back to his presently squabbling sisters. Such a sentiment from his youngest sibling he can excuse, knowing her nature to be more fancifully inclined, but by the huff of disgust Sally gives as Phebe goes on, Robert feels he must be alone in that. “So long as they leave father alone, I would think it most exciting.” There is a pause, deliberately so. “…Well, for _one_ of us, besides.”

Sally slams her book shut audibly, a gesture Phebe only lifts her brow at. She dips her needle again into the cloth worked at, and onwards her chatter goes, carving through the thickened tension hanging about the room. “And by that I mean for you, my dear Sarah.” Here Phebe glances at Robert, and suddenly he understands that this is no sisterly spat at all, but rather a shrewder warning for him. “Colonel Simcoe took _quite_ the shine to her, after all.”

“ _Phebe_ ,” Sally hisses, but their youngest sister has already risen up from her chair, smiling pleasantly at them both. She bids the two of them goodnight and sweeps from the room with no more than the trail of her skirts, leaving Robert with the distinct sense that this much was purposefully kept from him. He can imagine the four of them — his father and sisters — bent together over the table, discussing what sort of news would be too much to pile onto his presumed sensitivities.

“…Is it true?” Robert asks, unaccustomed to the flurry of emotion that descends upon him now, that has been sliding into his bones since the moment Abraham Woodhull walked through his boarding house door and brought the reality of the war before him. His sister, his own _sister_ , being ogled at by the very man who had beat their father to the ground. The thought of what _could_ have happened has an ill roll flooding through his stomach as though he is back on the ferry, and he had not even been here. He had been in the city, away from his family and seeking to bring the danger _further_ into their fold by agreeing to do the most despicable thing a Quaker such as himself could: lie his way through existing.

There is a pause between them, one of near pain. Sally reaches across the table for his hand, taking it within the comfort of her own.

“Yes, Robbie,” she quietly says, using the nickname of his childhood he had not heard in so long. “He seemed enamored, and I think because I was the only one to draw myself up to him and demand him to stop. He spoke pretty and empty words, but left father alone after that and went on his way.”

Robert rests his brow against his palm, wanting to ask a thousand questions and stemming all of them. It would do him no good to know if she was frightened or felt threatened — the answer there is obvious, but she had done something about it. She had been that way always, holding a strong sense of justice that went above any Quakerly principles, bold and forthright in what she believed right and wrong in a way Robert had never been; in a way he had envied. 

“I would not have forgiven myself if—“ Robert’s voice breaks, and he swallows a tight lump in his throat, blinking away the spots suddenly blurring his vision. Sally moves in closer, drawing her chair directly across from his, leaning into clasp both of his hands and cradle them close in her lap.

“If he returns, he’ll not be bothering us so again. He must have the cooperation of the town, and even the Tories are fond of father — we’ll not be alone.” She squeezes his fingers, rubbing at his thumb. Her eyes as brown as his look warmly on him, a beacon of home. The window rattles in the wind, and her voice lowers nearly as if in the interest of secrecy. “I know you fear for us in the city, but you are of _use_ , there, Robert. You—“

“What?” 

Robert sits up from his exhausted slouch, straight-backed and more alert than he’d been all evening. Quickly, he reads her face, from the wide-eyed startling to the flicker of sheepishness and shame in the wrinkle of her nose, the same sort of reaction she’d had as a child stealing a biscuit from their mother’s basket. She knows. Damn his father, she _knows_.

“Is there nothing the two of you do not share?” he asks despairingly, and Sally gives a slow shake of her head.

“When it comes to you, Robbie, very little,” she says as if it is all a matter of fact, regardless of how this sort of knowledge could get the three of them beneath the gallows. There is a light in her gaze, a mirror of the look he’d caught on his father when Robert had first told him of Abraham Woodhull and his risky, foolhardy scheme. Samuel had _encouraged_ him to follow this dishonest business as deep down Robert had known he would, and Sally, his daughter in every single way, would doubtless follow suit.

“Do—“ he begins, meaning to ask on if Phebe and Audrey are informed of this as well, but Sally answers his question before he asks it.

“No, no,” she insists. “This is between you and father and I, and it shall stay that way.” 

“I should _hope_ so,” he bites out with far more irritation than he can bring himself to feel. He glowers but drops the glare soon after, burying his face in his hands and struggling against allowing the nerves to overtake him. He cannot stop now. He cannot fold and return home to be vigilant over his family here, no matter how much he wishes to contrarily go against Sally’s coaxing of how he is _useful_ in the city. Men like Simcoe would not disappear on their own. They would need to be chased out, outsmarted and overturned and foiled like the rest of his Majesty’s men who lined their shores. He knows this in his heart, and it sits heavier than it ever has in his chest.

“Father told me because our views are one in the same. We trust one another, and we trust you. He’s very proud of you — but we need — _I_ — need you to know this:“ Sally touches his cheek lightly, and her small and familiar smile has a tilt to sadness to it. “—You aren’t alone, regardless of how you would prefer it.”

He is and he isn’t: that is the tired and awful truth of it. Sally would not understand that entirely, and if he has his way in protecting his family, he hopes she never will. He will work twice as hard to make it so.

Robert is quiet for a time, staring into the hearth fire where it flickers. He will stay until his father shows signs of healing, and then he will leave: then he will return to his boarding house and make plans for attaining higher levels of intelligence, the sort that involved those in the heart of the struggle. His establishment in the Bowery would no longer do. 

“…There is another, yes,” he speaks up after a long while, looking up to find Sally studies him still, frowning deeply with equal parts curiosity and concern. There is another, yes, one as good as a caged bird, caught in a place like Hell because Robert had refused him. If his father had told his sister as much as Robert gathered he had, the farmer at the boarding house is likely no stranger to Sally. 

“And if you know his name…“ Robert hesitates, fumbling with his words. He cannot deny his instinct to protect them both, unaware as to when Woodhull had slid his way into becoming one of the very few he would sacrifice much for. “—then I would ask you to never speak it aloud.”

Something in Sally’s gaze softens, and Robert drops his focus to the floor, studying the hardwood there in an effort to hide whatever may show on his face. She has always seen more of his thoughts than he would like, and he wonders what it is she perceives in them now. Evidently, it is the truth.

“You care for him,” she says, and it isn’t a question. Robert shuts his eyes, yearning for rest without reminders of his sister’s hungry patriotic fervor or rebellious imprisoned farmers. Sally gently presses at his shoulder and then rubs it, likely taking his silence as an admission of guilt. Whatever there is within him for Woodhull, it is a fire burning bright: a reason to put one foot after the other, to pull himself bit by bit into the dark underworld of where he imagines no Friend should be. 

“To bed, Robbie,” Sally coaxes gently, and for once, Robert holds back his pride and allows himself to be assisted. She takes him upstairs to his childhood bedroom, pulling the curtains shut and lighting a single candle, kissing his cheek before retreating back to the hall. He sinks into bed after changing and listens to the hushed murmuring of his sisters through the wall between them, curling up into the quilt his mother had stitched him so very long ago. When sleep comes, it is dreamless: and for that, he is grateful.

-

Upon his return to the city, he grows more agitated in waiting by the day.

MacDougal is none too happy to give up his footing in running the boarding house, and so Robert allows him to stay on as an extra hand for a short time while as he makes the transition back to working himself, finding he needs it. He is distracted while serving his patrons, often short-tempered and blunt, earning a comment to many on his choleric nature. While the eager Scotsman is too happy to operate in the early evening hours, Robert takes his cloak and wanders, purposefully ambling down streets with soldiers gathered and chattering about, only half-catching bits of conversation that have more gossip within them than any bits of useful information. As far as locations go, the Bowery is not the place to be: not if he wishes to ream anything that could make the slightest bit of difference.

He comes back to his establishment late one night, finding MacDougal absent and a British officer seated before the draughts table and feeling a stab of irrational distaste. How very ridiculous it is to wish for Woodhull there instead, a presumptuous _fool_ of a man to whom he has developed a streak of loyalty towards nonetheless, the irony there so sharp and keen that he has to bite down on his tongue from huffing out an embittered laugh for it. Composure is at least easily found when he has been developing the skill of keeping it throughout the whole of his life, and so it is to his countertop he strides to, removing his scarf and cloak in the process. His ledger book is opened soon after, a thumb smoothing down the page. He’s not yet seen his man yet before, and he is one to recall faces with ease. A new entry would needed to be made for his billing, and Robert drops his poised quill into the inkwell.

“A room for you, sir?”

A beat passes and then another with no response, and Robert looks up from his book only to meet eyes glinting to dance with mischief. The Major — as is evident from his epaulettes — tips his chair back to an absurd angle, a talent that the proclaimed professionalism of his Majesty’s army could not have taught him. He is observed, _studied_ by this imposter for the length of a baffling moment, and yet all makes perfect sense when the stranger speaks.

“Heard you’re a little shite who cheats at draughts, my friend.”

Robert appears unmoved, a miracle when within he is thrown (and a little affronted) by the comment. Carefully, he sets down his quill and moves instead to fetch a jug of ale, approaching the table with a fair bit of wariness. The man’s intonations are not fit for one ranking so high off of a likely commission and his posture the same, but even in times of peace Robert would be hard-pressed to extend his trust so simply.

“I don’t believe we’re friends,” Robert corrects as he fills his company’s tankard — a mug already perplexingly half-full out of his own doing, no doubt. No, not friends and nor would they be if he succeeded in keeping his ties to this endeavor to a minimum. He would, however, grant him: “Though I suppose it is possible we may share one.”

The building is quiet, all occupants of his rooms either asleep or out employed elsewhere, a strong possibility when he houses so many militiamen and privateers. He knows every creak to the floorboards and stairway, so it is with good authority that he judges they are alone, an assessment the man across from him evidently comes to as well.

“A farmer from Setauket sent me your way. He’s been playing at the law lately, but didn’t seem to agree with him.” The eyes appraising him grow no less entertained, but a shrewdness shines out from within them. “Said this boarding house was dependable, and the man who runs it even more-so. Any of that true?” 

The man removes his wig to reveal a patch of messed hair his hand runs through, dark curling strands tied in a skewed queue. Robert wrinkles his nose for the smell that emanates from him; salt and brine from the sea, potentially a little of old and rotted fish. Woodhull had not warned him to expect a soul, but he would believe this one to be an certain acquaintance from his provincial manners alone. “Truth can be subjective, sir,” Robert points out as he takes a seat across from him, unsure what to make of this creature. “But I would be a poor entrepreneur if I objected to a recommendation so complimentary.” He narrows his concentration on pouring a measure of ale for himself, despite feeling as though he may need a liquor far stronger. They could talk around this for hours, yes, but there are only so many games Robert can stand to play. “I trust...Mr. Woodhull is well?”

As if the very name is a pass-code, he is met with an ear-splitting grin reaching up to weathered laugh lines already there. The man’s face is one accustomed to joy, much like his father’s, much like his sister Sally’s, and he cannot say that is a commonality to be found within the king’s highly commissioned officers — a farce this one seems to be playing at being. “Townsley — right, no, sorry, _Townsend_ , then, that it? Robert?” He rubs his hands together with brimming anticipation, and then thrusts out one without further ado. “Abe sung your praises in his way.”

Robert stares at the pre-offered hand, hesitating despite those palms being no more dirtied than Woodhull’s had been. Agreeing by word to this reckless creature’s gambit had been far easier than allowing more of it into his life, bit by bit — madman by madman, evidently. And so it is with marked hesitance that he takes the man’s hand, a firm shake and squeeze to follow. His guest uses this as a window to lean in closer over the draughts board, his voice lowered despite their solitude here. Secrecy, at least, is an effort Robert can appreciate. “Caleb Brewster at the service of you and yours.”

He knows the name, having distantly related cousins of the same family of Setauket origin, and unless this man is a liar more sufficient than any other he’s come across, his words ring true. “Charmed,” Robert says dryly, eliciting a hearty chuckle from this Caleb as their hands part. “And yet...” There is an itch beneath his skin, unable to be so easily dismissed. “You haven’t answered my question.”

Brewster tips back his mug evasively, draining it of every drop of ale, releasing a low whistle when finished. “Better than that watered-down shite we scrounge up with the Continentals. Jesus.” He takes up the wig again, and Robert is hard-pressed not to find the slightest bit of amusement in the way it is unceremoniously jammed back on his head. A murmur of voices is heard out on the street, a reminder of the outside world around them. “Might speak a little easier behind closed doors. Much as I’d love to trounce you at a game...well. If you gave Abe a hard time of it, best not try my luck.”

Robert refills his emptied tankard first much to Brewster’s delight, snuffing out the candles and bolting the front and back doors while the man drinks his fill. It’s to his own room he leads him to first, attempting to ignore how the man tinkers with every odd and end he comes across, never-mind his few opportunities to given how stark and bare Robert keeps his belongings — but there he is hunched over his desk and soon seated in the chair, lighting one candle with another, poking through his assortment of quills. Robert is near to batting his hand away when the reason for such an interest is explained.

“Have a little gift for you here,” Brewster claims, placing two vials hidden away God knows where on the table. “Parchment?”

Robert gives him a doubtful eye, nudging his knee aside where it blocks the drawer. Tugging it open, he removes a few sheets, using but the scrap he does his bill calculations on. He certainly doesn’t trust the man with anything finer.

“Right,” Brewster says, rubbing his hands together before he gets to it. He describes the ink Robert had laughed at Woodhull for even proposing _existed_ , and when his doubts are again displayed, the veracity of those wild claims are shown to him in full. There is no trace of the words when they are scrawled by Brewster’s hand, but on the application of the re-agent, they flourish as if they had been there all along.

“…Now, I promise you,” Brewster is continuing on even as Robert’s fascination with the substance clouds his focus. “The only souls in possession of the re-agent are on our side, and they’re a few. The commander’s one, and,” he pauses, leaning in and lowering his voice so that even a listener on the other side of the enclosed room would be hard pressed to hear the name spoken, “Major Benjamin Tallmadge is the other.”

“And I suppose you’re about to say I can _trust_ each of you,” Robert says with a healthy dose of skepticism, lifting up the vial of the ink to inspect its innocuous contents for himself. _Trust_ is a sentiment he’s had little experience at all with, having only been in the practice of placing in his full faith in his immediate family and no others: he does not even trust Woodhull yet despite the risk he’s taken for the farmer, entirely due to the fact that Abraham does not seem to trust himself.

“No, course I wouldn’t. The General’s got the whole war at stake — and if he had to let us suffer some for the good of it, I’ve no doubt he’d do just that.” Robert’s gaze flickers to the man speaking so frankly now, his estimation of Brewster rising some. Not everyone would have given him so stark a truth. “And as for Tallboy, what he wants is for you to get the job done. He’s in it heart and soul, but he’s like Washington in that, the cause above much else. There’s a reason he’s the head of intelligence, y’see? He’d do anything to see the message through, and that cost sometimes falls on us. And as for me…”

“And you?” Robert prompts, setting the bottle down. The trepidation in him is wanting to skitter away, to shove Brewster’s miraculous ink into those crafty hands and see him packing. The weight of what he’d agreed to in Woodhull’s prison had never seemed so real as it does now.

“And me — Jesus, I just want my friends to get through this war. You could be one of ‘em, if we both play our cards right. I came here—“ Brewster rubs at his chin as if missing something, releasing a sigh of pent up frustration. “I came here to break that bastard out. Thought he’d say yes, thought he’d be overjoyed to say _yes_ so I could bring him to camp and he could wait out the war, _live_ out the war and get back to that little Sprout of his at the end of it, but he sent me off. Said he’d do nothing but wait on a release that might not come. I ferried beneath New York Harbor for that shite, cut off my _beard_ for him and— do y’know what he said? Do y’know why he’s staying?”

Before Robert can ask him how on earth one would ferry _beneath_ the harbor and why a beard might serve so much importance, he’s stopped by the pointedness of that question. _Do you know why he’s staying._ He remembers Abraham’s shadowed eyes in the rebel jail, the way their hands had met in the dark. Yes. Yes, of course he knows, and the knowledge gnaws at him with guilt.

“No, I—“ Robert stutters, the words stuck like a lie in his throat before he can continue at all.

“—Cause he says you can be trusted,” Brewster earnestly cuts in. “He says that we have our man in New York, and that our ring isn’t finished for that very reason. Christ, he puts a lot of stock in you. And I’d like to do the same, but before I leave this place, before I leave that boy here rotting in that godforsaken pit — you need to tell me, Townsend.” Where Brewster’s gaze had once been alight with humor, it’s deadly serious now. “Is this something you can do?”

Robert hesitates.

He hesitates, but he’d be a fool not to. He’d be a fool to readily _agree_ to any of this, to toss his life out willingly on the line without a good deal of consideration behind it. Promising to enlist himself in this business to Woodhull had been one thing, and putting it into practice is another. He is afraid, but so must have been his father when the Queen’s Rangers arrived to ravage their home; so must have been his sister when she drew herself up to Colonel Simcoe’s side and demanded he halt his soldiers. So must Woodhull be _now_ in that airless cell, awaiting on nothing but sheer luck to favor his cause. The fear would never abate, and neither would his regret were he to turn his back on what he has honestly come to believe now. For his family, for _Woodhull_ — he’ll not refuse.

Robert does no more than incline his head in the barest nod, and yet it seems confirmation enough for Brewster. The man openly grins, taking a coin — stolen along with the uniform, no doubt — out from a secreted pocket and reaching out to press it to Robert’s palm.

“A room for the night, Mr. Townsend,” Brewster says with a note of what nearly sounds like pride. “And I’ll tell you all there is to know.”

-

Between he and Brewster, a system is worked out.

The whaleboat man leaves come morning, disappearing into the street amidst a sea of uniforms just like his, indistinguishable from the rest. Robert hadn’t asked how he planned on escaping the city, and he didn’t want to know, having no doubt the courier’s method would be just as rash as the one that had allegedly brought him in. He doesn’t envy Brewster in his duties, but nor does he envy himself in his. There would be something of a standstill until — and if — Woodhull was released, but while that day was awaited, Robert was to gather information on what he could: and as he himself had decided, look into selling his establishment and buy into a business more profitable. He already had a place and a man in mind, an ostentatious fellow by the name of Rivington who was said to be looking for a new partner in his coffee housing venture. Robert did not _like_ him, necessarily, but he did not need to. The clientele he entertained were British officers of the highest rank, and there were fewer positions better suited for him to gather up information just as he would gather up their coins.

Unhurriedly, he makes his arrangements to take effect come autumn, offering a new price to MacDougal for the purchase of the boarding house, lamenting giving up the first enterprise he’d successfully and independently run. He’d envisioned something of a life here: he’d imagined discreetly waiting out the war and tightly managing his expenses, perhaps extending his father’s merchant service to the empty building next door, but now…his future had narrowed to either a hangman’s noose or persistent secrecy, and he found he dreaded both. He was well-equipped to lead a life in seclusion as a bachelor who planned on always being so, but when the nights drew on he sleeplessly lay in his bed and ached for something, someone. And were he more in the practice of being honest with himself, he'd be frustrated to realize that yearning was for a clever hand opposite his on the draughts board, a stubborn will to match his own and the silent understanding there would be between two civilians living their lives as a lie.

There is a face belonging to the subject of his quiet longing, and he scarcely thinks he will see it again until he _does_ one night nearly a month after Brewster’s visit — a late evening as he’s washing the dishes behind the counter in his boarding house, having not even stirred or thought to hope the sound of the opening door would be anything more than another traveling lodger seeking rest.

“Best out of three, wasn’t it?”

Wearied though the voice is, it rings familiarly enough for Robert’s entire world to stumble to a halt. His fumbling hands set down the silverware with a rattle; his spine stiffens as he swallows past the sudden dryness in his throat, summoning up his self-control where it’s slipped. By the grace of a formerly absent God, Woodhull lives, and he sees that for himself as he turns, glancing up with a nonchalance he doesn’t feel in the slightest. 

“Bit late for it,” Robert returns curtly, never mind the way those words tremble with the sort of emotion he thought he’d long since learned to bottle in. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

They stare at one another for a stretch of time, and openly so. He’d already banked many of the candles, but a few lanterns still burn brightly enough for him to see the outline of the man in the same dark coat he’d first met him in, looser though it fits now. That awful beard still lines his jaw, his hair unkempt and likely severely in need of a wash, but he is in one piece. He is standing of his own accord with exhaustion lined so deeply beneath his eyes the darkness appears as bruises, but the frozen corpse he’d feared, the forgotten and starving dead prisoner is no reality that has come to pass. What Woodhull sees as his gaze stares on back, Robert can hardly know. He fears he lets far too much show in his own regard. _Live,_ he’d told the man so long ago. _Live, and I will be waiting._

“I—“ Woodhull begins, scratchy and hoarse, but Robert gestures to the table and pair of chairs in the corner by the draughts board, clearing his throat and already moving for a pitcher of water.

“Sit,” he tells the exhausted man, and surprisingly, he listens. Woodhull drops into his seat heavily, briefly burying his face in his hands, and Robert allows him such a moment. He places a mug beside him, filling it to the brim when there is a touch to the back of his palm. Startled, Robert first finds himself looking at Abraham’s thumb stroking across his knuckles, and it is nothing he flinches away from. Instead — foolishly, surely — he allows it, not having the excuse of death at their heels this time to explain away his lack of protest to the inexplicable caress.

“Thank you,” Woodhull lowly tells him as soon as he’s allowed the contact to drop, and neither of them meet the other’s eye. The energy here is restless, uncertain, every word he'd envisioned himself saying suddenly lost to him now that they are once again in the same room. Robert clears his throat as if to dissipate the strange tension, leaving the man to his drink as he retreats behind the counter, warming up a crock of stew and cutting a considerable portion of bread he’d only made that morning. He brings a full plate to set down before Abraham, not the slightest bit surprised when the disheveled farmer snatches up the offered fork and goes to work on it. 

Pulling the curtains shut and barring the front entrance for any new arrivals, Robert waits until Woodhull is done, every last scrap done away with in a flurry of hunger he wouldn’t dare interrupt. After the final bite is shoveled in, Abraham lets out a long shudder, lifting his gaze to meet Robert’s.

“You know,” he says, and with a upwards tilt of his mouth that reminds him of a shadow of the man he’d met that first day, he adds: “You’re quite the fine cook, Mr. Townsend.”

Something in the words — perhaps the _tone_ — has Robert’s face irritatingly heating, and he takes the cleared dishes away, submerging them into a full basin to soak until morning. “I don’t know where you believe compliments will get you,” he returns, and yet whatever turn of wit he’d hoped to counter with in their usual manner falls flat. He isn’t ready for one of their games, not again. Privately, he thinks they have both tired of playing those, and Woodhull’s answer proves it.

“Ah, they could get me anywhere but the sugar house and I’d be pleased,” Abraham says, stretching in his seat even if the man’s very body seems to sag still, visibly weary. “…Might I ask if you’ve got a room open? I can’t pay you this evening, of course, but I’ll send the—“

“No,” Robert says, recalling (as he’s sure Abraham does as well) the payment he lacks still for his other stays. That ought to be reason enough to turn him out, but the two of them know he won’t do such a thing, not when their debts seem now to be shared along with much else. He absently picks up a glass to polish, scrubbing at the base of it with narrowed focus. It makes him less nervous than looking into Woodhull’s eyes does: and yet the storm in his stomach flutters only all the more. “No, consider this night on the house, though I still expect compensation for your previous time here.” He pauses. “Satisfied?”

Robert gestures to the loaf of bread on the table top, implying there’s more food about should he want it, but Woodhull, as always, speaks to him in double meanings. “Very,” he says, pushing his chair back and standing up. “Mind showing me up? Could rest a bit.” 

His unsteadiness doesn’t escape Robert, who eyes him closely as he leans back to stretch, taking a few steps closer until they are only inches apart. What a fine contrast they make: a drab Quaker in plain clothes and a filthy, bearded farmer. 

“And wash a bit,” Robert puts in dryly, sizing him up from head to toe with a look he can’t quite make distaste, not when other sentiments are clamoring about within him. In any case, Abraham laughs: not a full one, not while so worn down, but a true one. It has the fire in his chest warming only further, disconcerting and yet _welcomed_ after the long weeks behind them.

“I don’t suppose you’ve a razor?” Abe says, touching the scraggly mess on his face. Robert inclines his head in a nod, lifting a lit lantern and nodding towards the stairs. He is apprehensive, afraid of trusting himself alone with this man, but Abraham gives him a quirk of a smile once more and he can do no more than to lead them into the dark. The steps are rickety and creak, but the second floor of the boarding house is quiet, all either abed or elsewhere. He hears Woodhull hesitate behind him when he leads them around a corner that may be familiar to him; his own quarters, secluded and away from the rest. Abraham had last been here an eternity ago, it feels, when Robert had refused him before his father and slammed the door in his face. They have both, he imagines, changed a great deal since then.

He turns the knob and gestures for Abe to file in first, allowing him to settle in while he locks the door, his heart throbbing in his ears. Abraham sinks down onto the very edge of his bed as Robert pokes the fire in the hearth back to life, waiting for his company to ask _why_. Why his own room, why agree to spy, why the kiss to his knuckles before Robert had fled the prisons. And yet — none of those unanswerable questions are posed. Instead there is a nearly companionable silence while Robert maneuvers around, gathering a few clothes and a bucket of warmed water, a razor and his only spare nightshirt. When he turns around, Abraham is fidgeting with his hands, even now apparently unable to sit still. He looks up and seems as startled as Robert himself is for the offering, a far cry from where they began. _I don’t care to see you again,_ Robert had said, a laughable memory here. Again is that sense that the two of them are teetering on the edge of a cliff: he cannot help but to wonder who will be the first to fall.

Woodhull takes the pile, and Robert turns around give him his privacy as he changes. He busies around with the arrangement of books on his desk to give his hands something to _do_ throughout the subdued sounds of shifting fabric, trying not to imagine what he must look like beneath the layers he’d come in with. It isn’t his _business_ , he is fiercely telling himself when an audibly cleared throat announces it’s safe enough ( _safe enough_ : with Woodhull, is that possible?) to look.

Robert turns and finds Abraham pushing up the sleeves to the nightshirt where it’s a bit too long on him, the man moving towards the chair near the hearthside, bringing the razor along with the cloths and bucket of water with him. The farmer’s hands shake, and that is what propels Robert forward, reaching to take the supplies from him. He gestures for Abe to sit, spreading out a rag on the floor beneath them to catch the undoubtable mess about to be shed. He doesn’t miss how Woodhull eyes the razor in his hands, wary as if by habit.

“Don’t you trust me?” Robert asks, the query more honest than he means it to be. Woodhull’s far away stare is slowly drawn back to the present, leaving Robert half-aching to know where his mind has been. 

“…Should I?” is Woodhull’s response, bringing back a note of the old challenge between them with a familiar gleam to his eye.

“I won’t answer that for you,” Robert tells him, and gets to work. He uses soap for the lather and grimaces when he first touches th mess, ignoring the amused twitch of Abraham’s mouth. There is much of it overgrown, and with a great deal of concentration, he begins to scrape it away, one hand cautiously reaching for the man’s chin to nudge his head back. He hears — and feels — Woodhull draw a sharp intake of breath at that, and at once Robert looks at him, thinking his razor had already made a nick…and finding no trace of blood.

It was the contact, then. One touch and the two of them are fit to unravel.

“I’m sorry,” Woodhull says earnestly, squirming in his seat some before relaxing back a little. “It’s been a while.”

“If you’re discomforted, I—“ 

At this, Woodhull chuckles. He waves Robert’s words off, gesturing for him to continue. “Oh no,” he says, giving a little laugh again. Robert would demand what it all _means_ , but part of him already knows. “No, no, I’m far from uncomfortable, Robert. Far from it. Go on.” 

Robert gives him a sidelong frown but he does so, placing his full focus on shaving him once more. More of the face he’d first known is revealed second by second, the fine cut of his jaw gradually baring itself to him. Despairingly, there is something of the look of him that Robert _likes_. That he is drawn to. And never — _never_ — has he looked at any other and thought such a thing.

“I suppose it’s not the first time,” Robert murmurs to distract himself from his own mind, ducking down at another angle to carefully see to his neck, “that I’ve held your life in my hands, is it?”

The weight of Abraham’s gaze on him is burning, and in more ways than one. The eggs, the prison, this night: he must be remembering it all. Beneath his hand, Robert can feel the way the muscles of his jaw work, tightening and then releasing, fighting through some emotion he can’t see. “You’ve held it well,” Abraham says, a note of sincerity there that has Robert pausing. This is far from the ribbing and the goading that had defined their interactions in the earliest of days, and surely there is satire in that a pair of spies should begin to share truths between them. _I trust you_ — those are the words lingering beneath those spoken, and that admission is perhaps more dangerous than anything else they have told each other yet.

Drawing a breath and holding it before releasing, Robert finishes doing away with the beard, his fingertips briefly skirting along the new smoothness of Abraham’s cheek. To brush off what remains, of course, but to feel the warmth of that skin for himself has a cold part of his heart easing. He is alive. Whatever ice there had been deep within the prisons can touch him no more, and God willing never would again. 

He tidies up best he can, washing up himself and taking out his own nightshirt, eying Abe until the farmer sheepishly gathers the hint and looks away. Robert changes quickly, a flush reaching from his ears and flooding down to his chest, existing in a paradox of being irritated with himself for not being _angry_. This uncontrollable sensation of wanting should infuriate him, but it doesn’t. He can’t find it within him to loathe any part of this as he at last finds his bed, an unspoken agreement between he and Woodhull to lay in it together. 

They both slide under his covers, the candles dimmed and the only light left in the room coming from the dying fire. The bed ropes squeak beneath them as Robert pushes a pillow beneath Woodhull’s head, resting his against his own. He stares on up at the ceiling, unaware of his grip on the edge of the quilt until a hand spreads over his, attempting to loosen his tension. Slowly, Robert allows it — allowing too for Abraham to stroke his thumb along the back of his palm, a tremor running down his back for the sheer newness of it. Abe must feel that too, but he says nothing of it, caressing his knuckles in a manner almost soothing.

“I don’t know why you looked so surprised,” Woodhull says lowly after what seems a long time, and Robert blinks his eyes open, not so sure when he’d shut them. “I told you I would come and find you.”

Robert snorts even if there is nothing funny in the words, thinking of everything, _everything_ that could and should have gone wrong. “Forgive me if I didn’t place much faith in that prison of yours.” The frozen bodies dragged outside in the snow, the sick starving creatures within, his sentence itself. There wasn’t an end to the threats that could have taken him there. If his dreams are still haunted by what he saw in the sugar house, what are Abe’s like?

“Still,” Abe picks up as if in defiance of Robert’s thoughts, stubborn as ever. The touch to his hand travels up his wrist, Woodhull’s fingertips absently rubbing at his bone there. “I wouldn’t break my word. Not to you, Townsend.”

Robert is grateful the dark envelopes them, as he cannot say what would show on his face in this moment. A confusing mix of skepticism and yearning in one, too much to be explained. Yes you would, he should snap back, but that isn't what comes. “Why?” Robert asks, his voice hoarse, at last posing the question he’d wanted to beg from the start. He cannot hold the words in any longer. He cannot stand for it all to go unsaid. “Why — why me? Why wait, why come back at all, why—“ 

A finger presses to his mouth then, hushing his words. Woodhull takes his shoulder and nudges him once and again until Robert rolls onto his side, facing the man whose eyes glint through the thickened night around them. There is nowhere to hide here, and finally Robert can say he doesn’t want to run. 

“Your father told me,” Abe begins, pain and fondness both in the smile there and gone in a second. The man’s legs brush up against Robert’s beneath the quilt, kindling a strange heat. “He told me never to give up hope, so I didn’t.” Woodhull’s shoulders rise in a shrug as if it were truly that simple, watching him and searching his face for God knows what. He slides an inch or two closer, so near that their foreheads nearly touch. Robert’s breath is stifled in his throat, something deep within him clawing out for release. 

“Why?” Robert asks once more, needing to know, afraid to know, and the finger at his mouth moves down onto his lower lip. He doesn’t look away, and neither does Abraham, the farmer’s other hand coming to rest against his cheek, stroking over to the edge of his jaw. Inexplicably enough, Robert finds himself leaning into it.

“No more games?” Abe says, and Robert shakes his head.

“No more games.”

“All right, then here you are:” Abraham starts, his voice gentler than Robert’s ever heard it. This is the truth, because he’s always been able to spot a lie on this man’s face. “You were a man worth waiting for.” 

Later he will not be able to say who began it — all he knows is that there is a mouth covering his own, fitting there with a tenderness he’d not thought to expect. Robert cups Abraham’s neck, shuddering against him and letting out a noise he’s never before made. Whatever he is not brave enough to say, he makes plain here, his desperation growing and not so easily masked. He gives in. After a great deal of time and effort spent fighting Abe, fighting his awareness of _this_ , he gives in. There is a body pressed up against him, a quiet fulfillment to the longing he never knew he had, and Robert is, for once, in no hurry to flee or let this go.

They part only when there is a need for air. 

Together in the blackness around them, the only sounds are the panting breaths of them both. Abraham absently tugs on the end of his braid, and Robert bristles, coaxing a laugh from the other man.

“You don’t like that?” Abe asks, needling. Robert tilts his head the slightest bit away from him, not wanting him to see the flustering on his face even in this light.

“I like it too much,” Robert tells him in an indignant mutter, and of course the bastard does it again, weaving his hand through strands coming undone. He lets him for a while, roughened fingertips scratching at his scalp in a way that has the tense hold of his muscles drifting. Tomorrow, all will be different. Woodhull will return home to his family, and he will be left alone here in the city to carry out a dirty business. That is why his hands venture to slide across Abraham’s chest, feeling out the build of his frame above a thin layer. Every living particle of him is alive, buzzing with an energy he imagines will leave him empty when it’s gone.

“What is this?” Robert speaks up, breaking their brief span of silence. “What are we?”

Sinners, any good man of the Lord would say, for many more reasons than one. And perhaps he should believe that too, but he knows where his inner light is leading him. It took him some time to see where to, but so much is clear to him now. That path, no matter how twisted and crossed, wanders towards the man lying beside him. Where it will end, he’ll need patience to tell.

“I don’t know,” Woodhull lowly admits. He reaches again to cup Robert's neck, hesitating before the touch falls, sending a tremor along down his spine . There is a touch of confusion pulling at his brow, as if he too is just as caught off his guard by the whole of this as Robert is. "You're my partner. In this, in—"

"Culper Senior," Robert says as if to mock, but Abraham stills at that, unusual for a man who seems to stay alive by keeping in motion. He peers at him with sudden interest, thinking perhaps it's the reminder of the impending spycraft to come that has him so bothered when...

" _You_ liked that," Robert decides with an air of triumph, neither of them able to shake the habit of struggling to one up the other. He finds himself _laughing_ of all things, a rare occurrence to ring out so true.

"Too much," Abe echoes him from before, a tilt of a smile heard there, exhaustion too. "We'll have plenty to speak of tomorrow, won't we?"

Plenty to hide, plenty to deflect, plenty to share in the subtlest of gestures and words, of that much Robert knows. There is a familiarity to the push and pull between them, to the point where it's become the strangest of comforts. "Yes," Robert murmurs as he tugs up the blanket, tucking it around Abraham where he shivers, a consequence of his time spent enclosed in a space where many men never left. "Yes, I imagine we will."

They arrange themselves in tandem, the both of them on their sides, Robert sneaking an arm around Abe's middle and pulling his back to press up against his chest. Woodhull's shaking subsides as the hour grows later, his body growing heavier and heavier with rest. Robert nearly thinks him asleep when he stirs some, his roughened hand shifting to clasp at his.

"Can't remember," Abraham says, so wearily Robert hardly believes he knows what he's saying. "Can't remember the last time I thought I felt safe. Just like this."

Robert wants to tell him it's a lie: that he _can't_ keep him safe, that the two of them will never be safe while they move about in shadowed spheres and wear cloaks of deceit, but he can't. The words wither and die in his throat, lost and useless. If he could give this man who had suffered more than any might know a sliver of relief, no matter how much of an illusion, he would. 

"I'll be here," Robert says, disarming and letting his voice hold the smallest bit of softness, if only because he can't believe Woodhull will remember much of this come morning, "when you wake."

The man's breath evens, and the stress lines etched across his face fade back. Abraham looks at peace, maybe like the boy he must have once been. It's to that sight Robert closes his eyes against, allowing the night to drag him on down. When he dreams, it's of a world without war: rolling hills of greenery and a farmer with hair the color of soil keeping step beside him. They say nothing to one another, but there is no need to. The quiet understanding in his company is enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you lea for reading this one over for me! <3


End file.
